McGeorge Bundy

McGeorge Bundy (30 March 1919-16 September 1996) was US National Security Advisor from 20 January 1961 to 28 February 1966, succeeding Gordon Gray and preceding Walt Whitman Rostow.

Biography
McGeorge Bundy was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1919 to a well-established and prosperous Republican family. His father Harvey Hollister Bundy was an assistant to Henry L. Stimson, and McGeorge followed in his father's political footsteps by chairing Yale University's Liberal Club before graduating in 1940. He served as a US Army intelligence officer during World War II and was discharged in 1946 with the rank of Captain. In 1949, he was selected for the Council on Foreign Relations, and he helped to implement the Marshall Plan. Bundy went on to be a professor of government at Harvard University and became its youngest Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1953, developing Harvard as a merit-based university. In 1961, he joined the John F. Kennedy administration as National Security Advisor, supporting the deployment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops to Vietnam to help contain communism during the Vietnam War. He left the government in 1966 to become President of the Ford Foundation, serving until 1973. In 1979, he became a professor at New York University and became a scholar at the Carnegie Corporation, and he died in 1996.